Whether unintentional or intentional, injuries are a leading cause of mortality and disability and a profound drain on health and social resources. A public health approach to injury prevention also includes surveillance, to find out the extent of the problem, where it occurs, whom it affects and to identify the risk factors to understand why a certain group of people is at risk. Although there are statistics and registers available which provide some information about injuries, key information for guiding comprehensive policies for injury prevention is still lacking. Reliable information about external causes of injuries and risk factors is also needed. This includes information about activities, involved products, implied services, environments where accidents occur, the injury mechanisms and their consequences. This information is not provided by routine health statistics, but is indispensable for targeted interventions and their evaluation. Current initiatives. In order to tackle the data and information gaps harmonization and integration of existing national data collection systems is needed. The method of collecting more extensive data in a representative sample of hospitals has been proven to be most appropriate and most cost effective. Given the various shortcomings of individual health statistics in meeting the policy needs for accident and injury indicators, the aim is to combine the strengths of the most relevant data sources into a new added -value data set. Given their complementary strengths and similar settings – both being hospital based data systems - the integration of the external cause oriented IDB (Injury Database) (4) and the routine HDR (Hospital Discharge Register) is considered the most promising approach. The HDR routine medical data items complement the IDB data items on external causes, specifically, diagnostic and procedural HDR data items provide information for the development and implementation of disability indicators; and administrative HDR data items provide information for the development of a data model and sampling frame for valid and reliable national estimates from the IDB sample. This new INTEGRIS Database (ID) Coding Manual is meant to record the maximum available information at hospitals within the European Union on all injuries by complementing HDR and EDR (Emergency Department Register) cases with the IDB data items. Therefore, the ID Coding Manual contributes to the standardisation of injury and accident surveillance in the Eu ropean Union and is the basis for comparability of injury data from different member states. (Author/publisher)
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